I am pleased to announce the release of NetConnect v1.48. NetConnect is a Network Authentication Tool written in Perl that provides an automated login mechanism and scripting framework for CLI based network devices (i.e. Cisco Routers, Switches, etc).
There have been lots of enhancements since the last published version. Please see the CHANGELOG for the full change history. More information as well as download links can be found on the NetConnect page.
I am a big fan of IP Accounting as it enables me to keep long term-ish statistics on a per src/dst prefix basis. I am able to work out my weekly or monthly bandwidth usage and can see how much data each host on my network uses. I can see that I have used a total of 4.7GB in the last 5 days and the majority of that has been towards my Apple TV. A lot of people are probably thinking this is probably achieved better using a more scalable solution like NetFlow, but I like the ability to query this data on-box and not have to use a collector.
Having my network IPv6 enabled at home with an IPv4 tunnel providing IPv6 services, I was curious to know how much data was being delivered over IPv6. To my dismay I discovered that IP Accounting isn’t supported for IPv6. With a little help from the kind people at the cisco-nsp mailing list I discovered Flexible NetFlow with permanent caches.
After spending a little time investigating online gaming on the PS3, there appears to be a lot of conflicting information with regards to what NAT is and how the PS3 classifies your NAT type. Everyone who plays online seems to spend a lot of their time (instead of actually playing games) trying to achieve a different NAT type, or thinking their NAT type is why they keep getting shot.
NAT or Network Address Translation is something which people generally can’t avoid and has become the norm in computer networking. For a device to be able to access content on the Internet they need a public IP address. There aren’t enough public IP addresses (until IPv6 is fully embraced, which is still a way off) to give every one of your devices a public address which mandates a form of translation.